Description and aims

Digital Classics and Medieval Studies is an emergent subfield of the Digital Humanities where the objective is to apply computational and statistical approaches to the study of Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The field has seen a substantial growth in recent years and will become an indispensable part of any Classicist's and Medievalist's toolkit in the near future. It is also a field both the University of Oslo and the Finnish Institute in Rome seek to develop in international collaboration. Both the institutions consider it necessary to keep on the crest of the wave in the current atmosphere where the Humanities experience external utilitarian pressures all over the world and are constantly challenged to show their potential to adopt cutting-edge methods and technologies.

The University of Oslo has profiled itself as an innovative player in the Digital Humanities not only for its solid digital traditions in building the Syntactically Annotated Parallel Corpus of Indo-European Languages (PROIEL), but also because of the first Nordic Digital Humanities Conference taken place in Oslo in March 2016. Timo Korkiakangas also conducts his post-doctoral research project "Scribes and Late Latin Charters: a treebank-based study of the language competence of scribes" in Oslo. Likewise, the research focus of the Finnish Institute in Rome has become prominently digitally oriented as a consequence of Director Tuomas Heikkilä's activity in the field of computer-assisted stemmatology. This makes Rome a natural venue for a Digital Classics and Medieval Studies workshop.

Objectives

The objective of the workshop is to gather together both advanced and budding researchers in Digital Classics and Digital Medieval Studies. The focus will be on textual digital scholarship on written media in Latin, Greek, and other historical languages, including digital philology and computational linguistics in their various forms. Consequently, digital approaches concerning material culture, such as visualization of archaeological data, will not be covered in order to keep the focus sharp enough for an effective dissemination of ideas. The participants will be asked to give a 30-minute paper each (including ca. 10 minutes of discussion) on their own research:

1. concerning the methodological or technical problems they have encountered and/or
2. concerning the solutions they have found to those methodological or technical problems

The intention is to be as down-to-earth as possible and to avoid general overviews with no practical application. There will also be two one-hour special lectures. To ensure a high scientific as well as performative quality, we request in advance short abstracts (deadline 15^th of May, 2017). The abstracts will become available on this website.